NASA says new strategies will be needed to manage the ever-increasing flow of large and complex data streams from the agency’s many space missions.

Dozens of missions pour in data every day like rushing rivers — data that need to be stored, indexed and processed so spacecraft engineers, scientists and people across the globe can use the data to understand Earth and the universe beyond, the agency said.

For NASA missions, hundreds of terabytes — one terabyte is equivalent to the information printed on 50,000 trees worth of paper — are gathered every hour, creating what the technology community dubs “big data.”